Are You Ready for CARGO 3120?

One of the really cool things about becoming a content creator is that you can never be absolutely certain how your content is going to turn out. A great idea is nothing if it remains, simply, a great idea. It’s got to go someplace where it can be seen or heard or read or experienced one way or another by its audience, and the journey from brainchild to final “product” often takes many highly unexpected twists and turns.

The basic premise is clear enough:

Cargo 3120 is a Science Fiction action/drama set in the year 3120. The fate of an entire galaxy hangs in the balance from a menacing threat that lurks in the dark recesses of the Andromeda Galaxy. But when failure could bring about extinction level consequences on a galactic scale, coming up short is simply not an option.

There’s just one problem… The hope of a galaxy rests in the hands of unstable mercenaries and former criminals that are just one bad decision away from getting themselves and those around them killed. Now, their leader Marcus La’Dek must find a way to bring this team together to thwart the plans of the fast approaching harbingers of death.

Originally intended as a network or cable TV series, CARGO 3120 began its life under the title CARGO (without the year in which it was later determined to be set) as a Finalist in the 2012 People’s Pilot, written by Aaron Walker. Aaron entered another version of the pilot in the 2013 contest, along with a second potential pilot episode for the show written by Aaron Walker and Daymond C. Roman.

The odds against getting a spec original TV series on the air being what they are, Aaron and Daymond then decided to go a more individual – and affordable – route and make it into an animated web series. Today, in October of 2014, they’re still aiming in that direction but now are hard at work masterminding a web comic strip version to begin with. We at TVWriter™ are huge fans of the idea and its creators, so, starting today, we’ll be bringing you weekly progress reports by Aaron and Daymond as they do that thing creators do (well, actually it’s called struggling) to get the strip and the web series and the TV series going.

Okay, so how did Cargo 3120 come about? Well, that’s a story that begins in the summer of 1996 when Aaron and I met. We were both attending a California State Bridge program. It was designed to help kids like us (kids that just missed the cut) to get into college.

Aaron and I hit it off really well. We both loved all kinds of movies, especially scify, which was pretty rare at that time, black guys that like scify and admitting to it, especially with all the “cooler” things out at the time: Menace II Society, Set It Off, and Friday. And of course, we loved those movies too, but scify was our thing. Not only did we love the genre, but we also aspired to write and produce our own material one-day.

For hours, we’d throw around ideas and brainstorm exciting stories, write them down, and attempt to create screenplays out of those cluster sessions. The story for Cargo was already starting to take form. Only, we had no idea in how to write a screenplay or who to even show our works to. Remember, it was 1996, if you had access to the internet you were being charged by the minute for that dial up service. So, surfing the net for answers was not an option, and the library -forget it.

Looking back, I don’t think either of us were mature enough to develop a structured story, but our ambitions were strong enough to keep us going.